The Darkening Age

by Catherine Nixey

  ROMAN WOMEN PLAYING SPORTS, 4TH CENTURY AD The habit of bathing continued well into the Christian era, but more hard-line Christians looked with suspicion on bathhouses as immoral and the haunts of demons. Statues of Aphrodite and other gods, which often stood in the baths, were frequently mutilated and defaced by believers.

  ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM, the charismatic and fiery-tongued preacher.

  ST. SIMEON STYLITES SITTING ON HIS COLUMN, 5TH OR 6TH CENTURY Believers endured great trials for the love of God. St. Simeon spent over three decades on a column, until his feet and belly burst open from the pressure of continued standing.

  ST. SHENOUTE, RED MONASTERY CHURCH, EGYPT, C. 7TH CENTURY St. Shenoute’s face was said to be gaunt and hollow-eyed from continued fasting. Shenoute beat those in his care, hounded those suspected of paganism and declared that “there is no crime from those who have Christ.”

  EMPEROR JUSTINIAN 1, C. 547 Justinian was determined to “close all the roads which lead to error.” As part of this goal, he forbade anyone pagan from teaching, ordered the execution of anyone who was caught sacrificing to statues and forced the Academy in Athens to close.

  Chapter Fourteen

  * * *

  To Obliterate the Tyranny of Joy

  For the eye of God always sees the works of a man and nothing escapes him.

  —The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Gelasius, 6

  IF YOU HAD TRAVELED to the great cities in the eastern empire, to Alexandria and to Antioch, in the fourth and fifth centuries, then long before you came to a city itself you would have seen them. At dawn, they emerged from caves in the hills and holes in the ground, their dark robes flapping, their faces gaunt and pale from hunger, their eyes hollow from lack of sleep. As the cocks began to crow, while the city beyond was still slumbering, they gathered in the monasteries and hills beyond and, “forming themselves into a holy choir, they stand, and lifting up their hands all at once sing the sacred hymns.”1 An impressive sight—and an eerie one, their filthy, emaciated figures a living rebuke to the opulence and bustle of urban life below: a new, and newly strange, power in the world.

  This was the great age of the monk. Ever since Antony had set out to the desert to do battle with demons, men had flocked after him in imitation. These men were the ideal Christians, the perfect renouncers of all those sinful pleasures of the flesh. And their way of life was thriving: so many had gone out since Antony that the desert was described as a city.2 And what a strange city this was. You wouldn’t find bathhouses and banquets and theaters here. The habits of these men were infamously ascetic. In Syria, St. Simeon Stylites (“of the pillar”) stood on a stone column for decades, until his feet burst open from the continual pressure.3 Other monks lived in caves, or holes, or hollows or shacks. In the eighteenth century, a traveler to Egypt had looked up into the cliffs above the Nile and seen thousands of cells in the rock above. It was in these burrows, he realized, that monks had lived out lives of unimaginable austerity, surviving on almost no food and only able to drink by letting down buckets on ropes to draw water from the river when it was in flood.4

  What was a monk at this time? In the fourth and fifth centuries, the now-ancient tradition of monasticism was only in its infancy and its ways were still being formed. In this odd and as yet uncodified existence, monks turned to the wisdom of their famous predecessors to know how to live. Collections of monkish sayings proliferated. Self-help guides of a sort—but a world away from Ovid. What is a monk? “He is a monk,” wrote one, “who does violence to himself in everything.”5 A monk was toil, said another. All toil. How should a monk live? “Eat straw, wear straw, sleep on straw,” advised another revered saying. “Despise everything.”6 Athletes of austerity, these men mortified their flesh in a hundred ways on a thousand days. One monk, it was said, had stood upright in thorn bushes for a fortnight. Another lived with a stone in his mouth for three years, to teach himself to be silent. Some, nostalgic for the tortures of past persecutions, draped themselves in chains and clanked round in them for years.

  This monkish “city” was a living rebuke to the Roman way of life. If you can judge an empire by its adjectives, then the Roman Empire had been one that adored the urban. In Latin, urbanus meant, at its most basic, to be someone who lived in the town. But much more than that, like its English descendant, it meant to be cultivated, courteous, witty, urbane. The noun urbanitas meant “refinement.”7 Men of the empire were hugely proud of their cities: one wealthy citizen of Antioch felt so enthusiastic about his that he covered the floor of his house with a large mosaic depicting his hometown’s great public buildings. A second-century manual on public speaking advised how to structure a funeral oration. In the list of forty-odd workmanlike points that one should mention about the deceased, the very second (point I.B.1) should be his native city. This should be closely followed by mention of his fellow citizens (point I.B.2) and then, a little lower, his “public service.” Such virtues as “wisdom” and “temperance” languished far below, at points III.A.1 and III.A.2 respectively. Piety came in even lower, at III.A.58: a tertiary-league virtue, if that.*

  The affluent competed to lavish money on their towns, pave their roads, raise the stone stages of theaters and cover the heads of gods in ever-grander temples. “Philanthropy” is the term that later ages would give to such behavior. The Roman Empire was not so mealy-mouthed: as the plaques on such buildings frankly announced, their benefactors had paid for them because of their philotimia: their “love of honor.” The great stones of a theater or an aqueduct, engraved with your name, were a far more impressive monument than any tombstone—and frankly a far more socially useful one.

  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of the empire’s urban, urbane men found this new breed of men who shunned the civilized life baffling to the point of repellent. To the Greek orator Libanius, monks were madmen, “that crew who pack themselves tight into the caves” and who then “claim to converse with the creator of the universe in the mountains.”9 Their fasts were fiction, he said. These men weren’t starving themselves: they didn’t not eat; they just didn’t grow or buy their own food. When no one was looking, he said, they scuttled into the temples of the loathed pagans, stole those sinful sacrifices and ate them instead. Far from being ascetics they were “models of sobriety, only as far as their dress is concerned.”10 Their vicious and thuggish attacks on the temples weren’t done out of piety, said Libanius. They committed them out of pure greed. “They claim to be attacking the temples but these attacks are a source of income” because after raiding not only shrines but also local peasant homes, “the invaders depart with the loot from the places they have stormed.”11

  There may have been more than a touch of snobbishness in such disdain as many of those who set out for the hills were poor and illiterate. Some were even slaves—much to the irritation of their Christian superiors. Nietzsche and Engels would later equate Christianity and its values with slaves and slave morality—but if that is true, then no one had told the most powerful Christians in this period. They had no truck with such dangerously revolutionary ideas as the emancipation of slaves. Far from encouraging the escape of Christian slaves, senior clerics cracked down hard on any who attempted to escape their mortal bondage by disappearing into the desert for a more heavenly servitude. When one bishop advised slaves to desert their masters and become ascetics, the Church was appalled and promptly excommunicated him. “We shall never,” stated a canon of the Holy Apostles, “allow such a thing, which brings sorrow to the masters to whom the slaves belong and which is a disrupting influence.”12 The heavenly realm weighed in to help too. In the fourth century, St. Theodore appeared: a saint whose specialty was finding missing slaves. Sleep on St. Theodore’s tomb and, it was said, he would appear in your dream and show you where your recalcitrant slave was hiding.

  Monks needed to be in the desert for here, they knew, was where the demons swarmed and gathered. Here, where the city petered out and the empty spaces began, was where Sata
n’s minions swooped and slithered and struck. A monk out of the desert, Antony had said, was like a fish out of water.13 The monkish battle with Satan was not a pitched battle but a duel, and so monks shunned the distracting company of others. “I will not meet anyone this year,” resolved one.14 Such resolutions were not always easy to keep. In the endless solitude of desert life monks flailed and struggled and gasped. Loneliness gnawed like hunger. Their own desert places often had the power to scare these men far more thoroughly than any natural wilderness might. One monk was said to have wept so continuously that his tears, like a stream, had worn a hollow in his chest. Proof of his virtue, said admiring fellow monks. The modern mind would tend towards a more clinical (albeit anachronistic) conclusion: many of these men must have been profoundly depressed.

  Starvation was one of the most popular of monkish mortifications—no special equipment was required—but it was also one of the hardest to bear. One monk fasted all day then ate only two hard biscuits. Another lived from the age of twenty-seven to thirty on just roots and wild herbs, then for the next four years on half a pound of barley bread a day and some herbs. Eventually he felt his eyes going dim while his skin became “as rough as a pumice stone.” He added a little oil to his diet, then went on as before until he was sixty, to the awe and admiration of his fellow monks.15 There had been asceticism before—but this went further. Others, like ruminants, lived on all fours, browsing for their food like animals. In some ways hunger helped: a famished monk would be less beset by the demons of fornication or anger than one with a full belly. “A needy body,” as one put it, “is a tame horse.”16 But thoughts of food became an obsession with these men. In their reading of the Fall, the apple that Eve gives to Adam is not seen as a symbolic representation of sex; it is seen as nothing more, nor less, than an apple. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs made monkish flesh.17

  The monks tormented themselves by what they put on their bodies as much as what they put in them. Some chose to dress in woven palm fronds instead of any softer fabric. To wear the usual coarse monkish habit was regarded, in this extreme world, as being “foppishly dressed.”18 Others, under the desert sun, tortured their skin with abrasive hair shirts. Another dressed in an extraordinary leather costume (that would in a later era have different connotations) that left only his mouth and nose exposed. To be pleasing to the Lord, a monk’s clothes must, it was said, be an offense against aestheticism: a habit should be tatty rather than smart, old rather than new, mended and re-mended and mended again. Anything less was vanity. A monk’s clothes should be such that, if he threw his habit out of his cell for three days, no one would steal it. The monks’ self-sacrifice was unquestionable; their smell must have been unspeakable.

  If this sounds like a life lived on the edge of sanity, it was. In the searing heat of the desert day, reality shimmered, flickered and thinned.* One monk saw a dragon in a lake; another slew a basilisk. Another saw the Devil himself sitting at his window. Demons appeared then vanished like smoke; meditating monks turned into flames. Watch one monk as he prayed and you would see his fingers turn into lamps of fire. Pray well and you might yourself become all flame. Demons teemed around monks like flies around food. One monk was beset by visions of rotting corpses, bursting open as they decayed. Alone for weeks, months on end in their cells, with nothing more than aging hard bread to eat and an oil lamp to look at, monks were plagued by more tempting visions of sex, and food, and youth. Some monks lost their minds—if they had ever been in full possession of them. When Apollo of Scetis, a shepherd who later became a monk, spotted a pregnant woman in a field, he said to himself: “I should like to see how the child lies in her womb.” He ripped the woman open and saw the fetus. The child and the mother died.19

  The reasons for these peculiar practices are hard to fathom. One theory is that Christian domination of the empire had brought many gains; but one of its great losses was that it had become considerably harder to be made a martyr by unsympathetic Roman governors. Deprived of the chance to die in one terrible, glorious, sin-erasing show, these men instead martyred themselves slowly, agonizingly, tormenting their flesh a little more every hour, thwarting their desires a little more every year. These practices would become known as “white martyrdom.” The monks died daily in the hope that, one day, after they died, they might live. “Remember the day of your death,” advised one monk. “Remember also what happens in hell and think about the state of the souls down there, their painful silence, their most bitter groanings, their fear, their strife, their waiting. . . .” A terrible enough plight, but the monk had not finished yet; he concluded his cheering list with “the punishments, the eternal fire, worms that rest not, the darkness, gnashing of teeth, fear and supplications.”20

  Grim tales taught monks the value of not giving in to their urges. One particularly vivid parable noted what happened to a disobedient monk named Heron. As the story opens, Heron, rather than spending his time weeping in his cell, is having a lovely time going about the fleshpots of his local city, frequenting the theater, the races and the taverns. At one of these, his resolve weakened by eating and drinking too much, he meets an actress, falls “into the mud of womanly desire” and has sex with her. This act was performed, as the story records with satisfaction, “to his own wounding . . . he developed a pustule on the penis itself and he was sick from this for six months until his genitals putrefied and fell off.”21 A lesson to us all.

  Carpe diem, Horace had said. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will be dead for eternity. The monks offered an alternative to this view: die today and you might live for eternity. This was a life lived in terror of its end. “Always keep your death in mind,” was a common piece of advice: do not forget the eternal judgment.22 When one brother started to laugh during a meal, he was immediately reproached by a fellow monk: “What does this brother have in his heart, that he should laugh, when he ought to weep?”23 How should one live well in this new and austere world? By constantly accusing yourself, said another monk, by “constantly reproaching myself to myself.”24 Sit in your cell all day, advised another, weeping for your sins.25

  A hint of desert isolationism started to find its way into pious city life, too. In John Chrysostom’s writings, contact with women of all kinds was something to be feared and, if possible, avoided altogether. “If we meet a woman in the market-place,” Chrysostom told his congregation, herding his listeners into complicity with that first-person plural, then we are “disturbed.”26 Desire was dangerously easy to inflame. Women who inflamed it were not to be relished as Ovid had relished them, but eschewed, scorned and denigrated in writings that made it abundantly clear that the fault of the man’s desire lay with them. In this atmosphere a group of fashionable women with their low-cut necklines were not praised as beauties but excoriated as a “parade of whores.”27

  Eventually, clerical disapproval was reinforced by law. Pagan festivals, with their exuberant merriment and dancing, were banned. Dislike of them had been rumbling for decades: Constantine himself had poured scorn on the so-called religious festivals of the impious pagans and their drunken riotous feasts at which, “under the semblance of religion, your hearts are devoted to profligate enjoyment.”28 In AD 356, less than fifty years after Constantine had announced that “no man whatever should be refused complete toleration,” the death penalty was instituted for those who made sacrifices.29 In 407, the old merry ceremonies were forbidden. “It shall not be permitted at all to hold convivial banquets in honour of sacrilegious rites in such funereal places or to celebrate any solemn ceremony.” If anyone declared themselves an official in charge of pagan festivals then, the law said, they would be executed.30 John Chrysostom jubilantly observed their decline. “The tradition of the forefathers has been destroyed, the deep rooted custom has been torn out, the tyranny of joy [and] the accursed festivals . . . have been obliterated just like smoke.”31

  Such laws were easier to make than to police. How could Christians know what went on behind closed doors
? In one infamous sermon, Chrysostom came up with a solution: Christian congregations were to spy on each other. They would watch their fellow congregation for sinners—and by “sinners” he meant people who dared go to the theater—and, when they found them, they would hound them, shun them, report them. Nowhere was to be beyond the gaze of the good Christian informer, even private homes. “Let us be meddlesome and search out those who had fallen,” he advised in a sermon that encouraged Christians to hunt out those who were lapsing from true Christian ritual. “Even if we must enter into the fallen one’s home, let us not shrink back from it.”32

  Lest any of his flock felt awkward about such an intrusion, they were reassured, once again, that what they were doing was not done to harm others but to help them.33 Those who declined to act as informers would themselves be considered culpable, both in this world and in the next. Another vivid Chrysostom analogy sealed the point. In a household, “if one of the servants is caught stealing silver or gold, the thief himself is not the only one punished, but also his conspirators and anyone who did not report him.” In the same way, if a Christian saw another going to the theater (or as he put it “departing into the place of the Devil”) and kept silent, he would be punished by God—and by him. It would cause Chrysostom pain, he said, but he would “spare nobody from the most grievous penalties.”34